Being and Time by Martin Heidegger
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Society in general demands that the truth of our being come from others. Our cessation given our individuality demands the truth of our being come from our self. It is these two tensions that inform the work of early Heidigger which presents an impasse for Heidigger. he is unable to resolve these two tensions.
Middle period Heidigger returns to Kant’s critique of practical reason in an attempt to find the root of freedom in our will. That given pure practical reason — the law of our being proceeds from a rational moral core, from which our freedom can be recognized as a real. If we had no rational moral center, our actions would forever be characterized by environmental contingencies and we would have no way to recognize our free will.
It is then Heidigger’s mistake to assume that our rational moral core, the truth of our being, our authenticity, be determined as a conflation of statehood and individuality. That the alignment of both is the ideal state of authenticity. This difficulty comes back to being and time when Heidigger mistakes the temporality of being with historicity. This is why Kant avoided empirical answers; that environmental contingency will always color the takeaway of rationality; that empirical reason will distort pure reason in as much as pragmatic reason (induction) can never be proved given that the future is always presented as a foreclosure of possibility; ie, out of a bag of unknown colored marbles, my taking 5 black marbles may just be a fluke. With empirical reasoning I can always be fooled by randomness.
We shouldn’t necessarily spend too much time critiquing Heidigger’s mistake of picking Hitlerian Nazism as authenticity. Standard critiques aside, as Zizek points out, despite the obscenity of the statement, Hitler’s actions do not go far enough. Hitler’s actions are reactionary. Despite attempt at genocide and his deploring bourgeois German complacency history has shown us that Hitler’s role in power was to keep as much of this bourgeois complacency the same; that the mechanizations of socialism under Hitler changed as little as possible, proving that Hitlers ideas could never have moved the German people to realize any other logic, other than that which he preached against.
The main flaw with Heidigger’s procedure is simply that Heidigger does not understand that the determination of ones resolution of being isn’t only found with the threat of death. but that a resolution of being to determine who and what we are is always a struggle given the instability of language. Heiddiger’s assumption that language is stable presents, in the Lacanian sense, a psychotic world where being is left trapped as a foreclosed possibility. Heidigger’s assumption of the stability of language leads to his annoying twists of worlds to be as literal as possible, beating on language’s door as if words have any hidden truth that can be eeked out through literalness alone. Like Heidigger’s assumption that history is a rational trace of being, something that can be mined for the truth of one’s self, his mistake of temporality for history reduces the temporal process of self realization into an impossible stance.
Thus on the one hand, we have veiling, and on the other hand unveiling. This (un)veiling is a reflection of his own ideological assumption that there being comes and goes, that the metaphysics of presence only attains its fullness when language and dasein coincide (authenticity). It would have been better perhaps, if Heidigger was able to understand the fullness of dasien in daily life as a localized distortion in history rather than the fulfillment of history. His quasi-dialectical assumption of (un)veiling is proof that this distortion lies within the presence of being itself, something that struggles within the confines of itself rather than within the confines of they-self. in terms of Lacan, Zizek is correct to say that the gap isn’t as Heidigger assumed, between mitdasein and dasein but within dasein itself. This also carries forth that there is also a constituent gap in mitdasein itself, that language is not complete, that the demands of the other (statehood, and so on) are never authentic (consistent or complete).
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